Eli Attia alleges he wasn’t the only one mistreated by the search giant.

A long-running lawsuit filed against Google by a prominent architect has just gotten much broader.

Last week, the Superior Court of California granted a motion adding racketeering charges to the civil case being pursued against Google by Eli Attia, an expert in high-rise construction. Attia claims Google stole his idea for an innovative building design method – and now he wants to prove that it does the same thing frequently.

Attia’s suit was originally filed in 2014, four years after he began discussions with Google (prior to its reorganization as Alphabet) about developing software based on a set of concepts he called Engineered Architecture. Attia has said Engineered Architecture, broadly described as a modular approach to building, would revolutionize the design and construction of large buildings. Attia developed the concepts based on insights gleaned from his high-profile architecture career, and has called them his life’s work.

Google executives including Google X cofounder Astro Teller came to share his enthusiasm, and championed developing software based on Engineered Architecture as one of the company’s “moonshots.” But Attia claims the company later used his ideas without fulfilling an agreement to pay to license them.

Attia’s suit names not just Google, but individual executives including founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It also names Flux Factory, the unit Attia’s suit alleges was spun off specifically to capitalize on his ideas.

Speaking to the San Jose Mercury News, Attia’s lawyer claims Google told Attia his project had been cancelled, “when in fact they were going full blast on it.” Flux Factory is now known as Flux, and touts itself as “the first company launched by Google X.”

Attia’s suit will now also seek to prove that his case is representative of a much broader pattern of behavior by Alphabet. According to court documents, the motion to add racketeering charges hinged on six similar incidents. Those incidents aren’t specified in the latest court proceedings, but Alphabet has faced a similar trade-secrets battle this summer over X’s Project Loon, which has already led to Loon being stripped of some patents.

The idea of racketeering charges entering the picture will surprise many who associate them with violent organized criminals. But under RICO statutes, civil racketeering suits can be brought by private litigants against organizations and individuals alleged to have engaged in ongoing misdeeds. The broader use of racketeering charges has slowly gained ground since the introduction of RICO laws in the 1960s, with some famous instances including suits against Major League Baseball and even the Los Angeles Police Department.

Last Friday, engineers on Google’s internet-by-balloon Project Loon tweeted that they hoped to bring emergency connectivity to Puerto Rico after Hurricanes Irma and Maria left more than 90 percent of the island without cellphone coverage.

Just seven days later, the Federal Communications Commission Friday gave the company a green light to fly 30 balloons over Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands for up to six months.

If all goes to plan, Google’s balloons will soon help replace the thousands of cellphone towers knocked down by hurricane-strength winds. The balloons would provide voice and data service through local carriers to users’ phones.

The details of those arrangements aren’t complete. But in its application to the FCC, Google included letters and emails from eight wireless carriers in Puerto Rico, in which they consented for Loon to use their frequencies for disaster relief and to restore limited communications. Two of those agreements were dated Friday.

Google has previously deployed Loon to provide emergency phone service, in Peru following flooding there earlier this year. In Peru, Google had already been working closely with a local wireless network, Telefonica, to coordinate spectrum use and prepare handsets to work with its balloons.

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In Puerto Rico, “things are a little more complicated because we’re starting from scratch,” a Google spokesperson says. “Loon needs be integrated with a telco partner’s network—the balloons can’t do it alone.”

Project Loon was born in Google’s moonshot X division, with the aim of serving the half of the world’s population that is still without internet access. It has launched several successful pilot projects, but has yet to be deployed commercially on a wide scale. It also is embroiled in a lawsuit with Space Data, a small company accusing Google of patent infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, and breach of contract following a failed acquisition bid.

With the FCC’s special temporary license in Puerto Rico, Google plans to work along the same lines as in Peru. Thirty Loon balloons will float 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) above the earth in the stratosphere, relaying communications between Google’s own ground stations connected to the surviving wireless networks, and users’ handsets.

Each balloon can serve 5,000 square kilometers (1,930 square miles), so the fleet is expected to provide service over all of Puerto Rico and potentially parts of the US Virgin Islands. Google said it would consult with networks in the British Virgin Islands to minimize interference there.

Another issue is that Google’s technology is still set up for Peru, so some handsets in Puerto Rico may need updates to use the balloon-connected service. Google says it is working on temporary over-the-air software fixes for affected devices, which could include handsets from Apple, Samsung, and LG.

With approval in hand, Google will turn to launching the balloons. Google could not say when it will fly or when service would begin, but a spokesperson said, “We’re sorting through a lot of possible options now and are grateful for the support we’re getting on the ground.”

Restoring voice and data communications cannot come quickly enough for some of the affected. On Tuesday, Mother Jones reported Puerto Rico governor Ricardo Rosselló as saying, “Some people, even though we’ve documented the fact… that we’ve delivered food and water, it hasn’t gotten to some of them. Now, it could be for a whole host of reasons. One of them could be that they couldn’t hear it; the information didn’t get to them.”

Google is reportedly preparing to start designing and manufacturing its own smartphone, according to a new report. While some giddily clap at the idea of an Android smartphone straight from the mothership, it’s actually not a great idea. Nexus Starting (and possibly ending) with HTC, Google asked its hardware partners to build devices for it. Those devices, dubbed ‘Nexus’ (even if they had additional branding) were essentially top-end smartphones that (mostly) sold for a pretty deep discount. Nexus handsets are also reference devices. Even if you weren’t a fan of straight-up, vanilla Android, Nexus was Google’s soft way of saying…

Google has created a list that ranks smartphone manufacturers and carriers “by how up-to-date their handsets are, based on security patches and operating system versions,” according to the report. Though the list has only been shared with Google’s partners for now, the company is apparently considering making it public in the hopes of “shaming” the companies into doing a better job at keeping their customers’ devices up to date. Read more…

For all those moments when text, punctuation and emoji aren’t enough for communicating, there’s now a keyboard with a built-in search feature that allows you to pull results directly from Google Images and paste them into your message. Image Search Keyboard, available for free on iOS was developed by Rocketship. It’s surprisingly quick considering it has to contact Google’s servers and then deliver results back. Once you’ve downloaded the app, go to Settings > General > Keyboard >Keyboards > Add New Keyboard, Tap Image Search twice then Allow Full Access to allow searching for images. Tap the globe key on your…

More than two months after Google removed paid ads from the right side of its search engine result page (SERP), Adobe has some encouraging news. Overall, the change seems to generated a positive impact for most advertisers and consumers.

While Google Apps is a great service, Rackspace email might be better for some users. More and more web hosting services, especially ones that provide WordPress hosting, are separating email service from site hosting. For example, one of the biggest …

Apple has moved some of its iCloud and services data from Amazon Web Services to Google’s cloud platform, in what is seen as a bid by the iPhone maker to diversify its cloud service providers, according to reports.

The move comes even as the company is building its own new data centers, leading to speculation whether the shift is only temporary.

Google is a rival of Apple in smartphones and other devices, but such deals are common among tech companies in areas where they don’t compete.

After signing the deal with Google late last year, Apple has significantly reduced its reliance on AWS, whose infrastructure it has been using to run parts of iCloud and other services, reported CRN, quoting sources with knowledge of the matter. The publication put Apple’s spending with Google at between $ 400 million and $ 600 million, though it added it wasn’t clear whether the figures referred to an annual spending rate or a set amount of capacity.

Getting insights out of big data is typically neither quick nor easy, but Google is aiming to change all that with a new, managed service for Hadoop and Spark.

Cloud Dataproc, which the search giant launched into open beta on Wednesday, is a new piece of its big data portfolio that’s designed to help companies create clusters quickly, manage them easily and turn them off when they’re not needed.

Enterprises often struggle with getting the most out of rapidly evolving big data technology, said Holger Mueller, a vice president and principal analyst with Constellation Research.

“It’s often not easy for the average enterprise to install and operate,” he said. When two open source products need to be combined, “things can get even more complex.”

Getting insights out of big data is typically neither quick nor easy, but Google is aiming to change all that with a new, managed service for Hadoop and Spark.

Cloud Dataproc, which the search giant launched into open beta on Wednesday, is a new piece of its big data portfolio that’s designed to help companies create clusters quickly, manage them easily and turn them off when they’re not needed.

Enterprises often struggle with getting the most out of rapidly evolving big data technology, said Holger Mueller, a vice president and principal analyst with Constellation Research.

“It’s often not easy for the average enterprise to install and operate,” he said. When two open source products need to be combined, “things can get even more complex.”

Getting insights out of big data is typically neither quick nor easy, but Google is aiming to change all that with a new, managed service for Hadoop and Spark.

Cloud Dataproc, which the search giant launched into open beta on Wednesday, is a new piece of its big data portfolio that’s designed to help companies create clusters quickly, manage them easily and turn them off when they’re not needed.

Enterprises often struggle with getting the most out of rapidly evolving big data technology, said Holger Mueller, a vice president and principal analyst with Constellation Research.

“It’s often not easy for the average enterprise to install and operate,” he said. When two open source products need to be combined, “things can get even more complex.”

Getting insights out of big data is typically neither quick nor easy, but Google is aiming to change all that with a new, managed service for Hadoop and Spark.

Cloud Dataproc, which the search giant launched into open beta on Wednesday, is a new piece of its big data portfolio that’s designed to help companies create clusters quickly, manage them easily and turn them off when they’re not needed.

Enterprises often struggle with getting the most out of rapidly evolving big data technology, said Holger Mueller, a vice president and principal analyst with Constellation Research.

“It’s often not easy for the average enterprise to install and operate,” he said. When two open source products need to be combined, “things can get even more complex.”

Getting insights out of big data is typically neither quick nor easy, but Google is aiming to change all that with a new, managed service for Hadoop and Spark.

Cloud Dataproc, which the search giant launched into open beta on Wednesday, is a new piece of its big data portfolio that’s designed to help companies create clusters quickly, manage them easily and turn them off when they’re not needed.

Enterprises often struggle with getting the most out of rapidly evolving big data technology, said Holger Mueller, a vice president and principal analyst with Constellation Research.

“It’s often not easy for the average enterprise to install and operate,” he said. When two open source products need to be combined, “things can get even more complex.”

Although the Cupertino, Calif., company did not boost the amount of free storage space — as Computerworld speculated it might — and instead continued to provide just 5GB of iCloud space gratis, it bumped up the $ 0.99 per month plan from 20GB to 50GB, lowered the price of the 200GB plan by 25 percent to $ 2.99 monthly, and halved the 1TB plan’s price to $ 9.99.

If you’ve noticed Google doing a better job of understanding what you say using speech recognition on your smartphone lately, you’re not crazy. Google’s voice search has indeed become more accurate, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, the tech company announced today.

“Today, we’re happy to announce we built even better neural network acoustic models using Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and sequence discriminative training techniques,” Google Speech Team members Haşim Sak, Andrew Senior, Kanishka Rao, Françoise Beaufays and Johan Schalkwyk wrote in a blog post today. “These models are a special extension of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that are more accurate, especially in noisy environments, and they are blazingly fast!”

The new models are working in the Google app for iOS and Android, as well as dictation on Android, which works inside of some third-party apps, the team members wrote.

Google has reported improvements in voice search not once but twice this year. Clearly the company has been investing in the underlying technology. RNNs are one increasingly popular approach to doing deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence, and Google is widely thought to have a deep bench in deep learning.

“In addition to requiring much lower computational resources, the new models are more accurate, robust to noise, and faster to respond to voice search queries — so give it a try, and happy (voice) searching!” wrote Sak, Senior, Rao, Beaufays, and Schalkwyk.

Read the full blog post for more detail on how the team managed to get the new performance gains.

We’re a bit surprised it took Google this long to debut an iOS app for its note-taking service. Google Keep first launched way back in March 2013 for Android and the Web, meaning the iOS version is showing up 30 months later. Google even brought Google Keep to Android Wear, its smartwatch platform, in June 2014.

Nonetheless, Google says the features Google Keep users have come to expect on Android and the Web are now available to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users. That means iOS users can search and filter notes by color and type (images, audio, and text), add labels, set time or location-based reminders, and share notes for basic real-time collaboration.

Here is the full feature list, from the iTunes description:

Capture, edit, share, and collaborate on your notes on any device, anywhere.

Add notes, lists, photos, and audio to Keep.

Organize your notes with labels and colors.

Set and forget. Get reminded about a note at the right time or place.

Record a voice memo and have it automatically transcribed.

Grab the text from an image to help you quickly find that note again through search.

This release isn’t going to convert Evernote or OneNote users, as both have iOS apps with plenty of features. If, however, you’re already using Google Keep on another one of your devices, being able to access your notes on your Apple gadget is a welcome addition. If you’re a Windows Phone user, we wouldn’t hold our breath until Google shows some interest in Windows 10.

While it appears this is a full-featured release, we have asked Google if there is anything missing from the iOS app that is currently available on Android and the Web. We will update you if we learn anything new.

Google has rolled out a series of updates for Google Play and Android 6.0 Marshmallow today aimed at giving better support for developers. The company announced that Marshmallow now has a new permissions model aimed at improving the way app installs and updates are handled. Additionally, Google Play services 8.1 offers support runtime permissions, a new Play Games Player Stats API, and more.

Within Google’s newest mobile operating system version, a new app permissions model promises to let developers offer more control to the users. Not only can the app declare the permissions it’s going to need, but permissions will be divided into groups based on their functionality, making the organization easier. Marshmallow also includes limits on how permissioning is handled at install time — users won’t be prompted to grant permission to some apps because of the nature of these services, such as alarm clock or Internet apps.

Developers interested in tapping into the updated permission model can view more information here. Google cautions that during the preview period, not all of its core apps will have fully implemented this new model.

Besides Android 6.0 Marshmallow, Google Play services has received some updates. The completed rollout of version 8.1 now allows developers to customize the email invitation with a custom image and a call-to-action button. The idea is that by giving more control to developers, more engagement and conversions will happen.

Game developers will be interested in the new Play Games Player Stats API, which will let developers better tailor the user experience to specific segments of players. In an example, Google said that the most valuable players could be rewarded with a special welcome back message when returning to the game.

For those developers using Google Nearby, the company has added a feature that gives apps the ability to receive a callback when an active Nearby publish or subscribe expires. Google Nearby lets apps communicate with nearby devices, and traditionally it would hog up resources. But this update claims to improve accuracy and make it easy to enable apps across devices to talk to one another.

This is the first update to Google Play services since last month, when new APIs were made available that let developers utilize face detection, barcode recognition, and facilitated Nearby Messages.

Getting insights out of big data is typically neither quick nor easy, but Google is aiming to change all that with a new, managed service for Hadoop and Spark.

Cloud Dataproc, which the search giant launched into open beta on Wednesday, is a new piece of its big data portfolio that’s designed to help companies create clusters quickly, manage them easily and turn them off when they’re not needed.

Enterprises often struggle with getting the most out of rapidly evolving big data technology, said Holger Mueller, a vice president and principal analyst with Constellation Research.

“It’s often not easy for the average enterprise to install and operate,” he said. When two open source products need to be combined, “things can get even more complex.”

Some departments in your company do not need cloud computing resources to carry high-performance tasks, right? Because Google has just formatted a service plan for such demands. Google launched Preemptible Virtual Machine, a new cloud service that allows to use computing resources at low costs. The offer is suitable for workloads with low priority and can, therefore, be interrupted.

The search giant introduced a new cloud platform that cost 70% less than the same default setting in Compute Engine. The Preemptible Virtual Machine can do well cheap, about $ 0.01 per instance/hour. The most affordable VM charges per hour can range anywhere between $ 0.03 per hour, up to $ 0.11 per hour or more. The problem is that the VMs may stop working when you need it or face peak periods.

The company argues, however, that the offer (in beta) serves very well the various computational tasks. The company cites, for example, some critical workflows that can be distributed among multiple virtual machines. However, it would be a bad idea to adopt the approach to process analysis, modeling, and simulations that require high computing power and instant answers.

To provide the service, Google will use the free capacity in its data center. At times when there is a peak in demand and Google needs more resources, virtual machines involved in Preemptible Compute Engine VMs are recalled and interrupts the current processing. Users receive a notice period of 30 seconds, which should be enough to save your work. Google said No Preemptible VM can run for more than 24 hours straight.

According to the Google post, “all machine types are charged a minimum of 10 minutes. For example, if you run your instance for 2 minutes, you will be billed for 10 minutes of usage. After 10 minutes, instances are charged in 1 minute increments, rounded up to the nearest minute. For example, an instance that lives for 11.25 minutes will be charged for 12 minutes of usage.”

According to Google, there are many that utilize cloud scalability and pricing model to calculate relatively intensive, but short-term assignments. It includes the coding of video, reproduction of visual effects and calculations based on large amounts of information, such as in data analysis, simulation, and genomics.

The solution is quite similar to that of Spot Instances offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The model of AWS differs in price. Google has a fixed cost while the competitor price varies according to demand.

The market leader AWS routinely cuts their cloud pricing. The company is facing tough competition with Google and Microsoft to maintain its lead in cloud computing and tries to woo more developers to come to its solutions with lower prices, more hardware offerings and more advanced technologies. Microsoft, on the other hand, progressed enough to be a serious threat to Amazon’s dominance in the market.

Some departments in your company do not need cloud computing resources to carry high-performance tasks, right? Because Google has just formatted a service plan for such demands. Google launched Preemptible Virtual Machine, a new cloud service that allows to use computing resources at low costs. The offer is suitable for workloads with low priority and can, therefore, be interrupted.

The search giant introduced a new cloud platform that cost 70% less than the same default setting in Compute Engine. The Preemptible Virtual Machine can do well cheap, about $ 0.01 per instance/hour. The most affordable VM charges per hour can range anywhere between $ 0.03 per hour, up to $ 0.11 per hour or more. The problem is that the VMs may stop working when you need it or face peak periods.

The company argues, however, that the offer (in beta) serves very well the various computational tasks. The company cites, for example, some critical workflows that can be distributed among multiple virtual machines. However, it would be a bad idea to adopt the approach to process analysis, modeling, and simulations that require high computing power and instant answers.

To provide the service, Google will use the free capacity in its data center. At times when there is a peak in demand and Google needs more resources, virtual machines involved in Preemptible Compute Engine VMs are recalled and interrupts the current processing. Users receive a notice period of 30 seconds, which should be enough to save your work. Google said No Preemptible VM can run for more than 24 hours straight.

According to the Google post, “all machine types are charged a minimum of 10 minutes. For example, if you run your instance for 2 minutes, you will be billed for 10 minutes of usage. After 10 minutes, instances are charged in 1 minute increments, rounded up to the nearest minute. For example, an instance that lives for 11.25 minutes will be charged for 12 minutes of usage.”

According to Google, there are many that utilize cloud scalability and pricing model to calculate relatively intensive, but short-term assignments. It includes the coding of video, reproduction of visual effects and calculations based on large amounts of information, such as in data analysis, simulation, and genomics.

The solution is quite similar to that of Spot Instances offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The model of AWS differs in price. Google has a fixed cost while the competitor price varies according to demand.

The market leader AWS routinely cuts their cloud pricing. The company is facing tough competition with Google and Microsoft to maintain its lead in cloud computing and tries to woo more developers to come to its solutions with lower prices, more hardware offerings and more advanced technologies. Microsoft, on the other hand, progressed enough to be a serious threat to Amazon’s dominance in the market.

Keep – Google’s simple note-taking app – is finally arriving on iOS. It’s the same set of features you’ve come to expect from the Android and Web versions. You can create colored notes and to-do lists, search for information by photo, audio, or text, or add labels to help keep things organized. You can also set reminders based on a time or location so you don’t forget an item from your next shopping list. Of course, it’s connected to the cloud, so your notes will be saved across all your devices, and collaborative functionality means you can share notes with others and work…

More than two years after launching Google Keep on Android, the company is finally bringing its note-taking app to iOS: Google rolled out a new version of Keep for iPhones and iPads Thursday.

Like the Android and web version of the app, Keep on iOS allows you to arrange your notes into a sticky-note-like interface. Notes are synced with your Google account so you can access them across devices.

Though not as full-featured as some competitors like Evernote, Google’s free app offers much more than Apple’s new Notes app. Recorded voice memos are automatically transcribed and you can share notes with people you know so others can collaborate on a checklist, for example. Read more…